Demolition Blues

Anni Webster                                          

Published in ‘Bjelke Blues’ pp. 132-139. AndAlso Books 2020

‘Make love, not war!’ a chanting crowd jostles me. Some one thrusts a placard into my hand and I hold it aloft, honoured at being chosen. A sweaty hand jerks my calico shoulder bag until I turn around.

‘Not like that,’ the bearded student shouts, ‘for God’s sake face the cameras. What’s the point if no-one can see you?’

We call in unison. ‘The people united will never be divided.’ A man in a Che Guevara beret is whipping up the crowd with words, urging us to commit to action.

‘Together, we can change the world.’

It’s 1968, I’m 17, in my first year at university, at a protest street march.

The sandstone cloisters at the university, with gargoyles peering down on all below, were an imposing sight. I was in awe of my surroundings and excited by what was on offer but aching with loneliness. Conversations were not part of daily life in our house. My parents lived in fear of raising precocious children who had opinions. But at university, opinions fuelled social life. Despite looking footloose and free in my halter-necked mini, inside I was a timid nerd, socially ill at ease.

My coming of age in the late 1960s, the excitement of exploring that radical era, pushing boundaries and losing innocence, and my descent into chaos during early adulthood, almost mirrors the man whose rise and fall in power over those two decades of change formed the political backdrop to my own life dramas. Joh Bjelke-Peterson was premier of Queensland from mid 1968 to late 1987.

In 1968, I was an eager participant in the winds of change sweeping aside tired traditions across the globe. Wide-eyed and trusting, like many young people at the time, we wanted to change the world to be fairer, more just, more peaceful. Through those decades Joh was in power, I felt the mounting frustration and fear of living in a tightening police state. By the time Joh fell foul of the Fitzgerald inquiry into corruption, I was a battle-worn single mother; my earlier academic promise reduced to dust.

Thoughts of Joh and my student years sprang to mind while cleaning out a cupboard, when I found a china coffee cup and saucer. Both were marked with the distinctive black and white symbol of the Belle Vue Hotel, a graceful swirl of interlaced letters, BVH. The Belle Vue was an elegant example of 1880s Queensland colonial architecture, and one of Brisbane’s most loved heritage buildings.

Public outrage at Joh’s ordering of a midnight demolition raid on the Belle Vue marked a turning point for his opponents as well as allies. Although Joh ruled for another decade beyond that 1979 ‘moonlight vandalism,’ awareness grew around Australia that democracy in Queensland was in peril. When cross examined on trial, after the full extent of corruption of his government and police force was revealed, he was still painfully oblivious of the hallmark doctrine of Westminster democracy – ‘separation of powers’.

∞

My first year of university exploded into being. Historian Mark Kurlansky called 1968 ‘the year that rocked the world’. My known world was upended as the wider world erupted in a rollercoaster of ferment. ‘Petty restrictions’ of the establishment were challenged; dreams of peace and freedom promised by the ‘counterculture’ hovered before our eyes.

Brisbane’s first anti-war and civil liberties march had been held the previous year, organised by a coalition of Queensland Civil Liberties Council and the Society for Democratic Action at the university. Thousands of staff and students marched to the city where they met police with truncheons and orders to use them. Over a hundred were arrested.

 Now I was at uni, I could take part. Most lunchtimes, hundreds of students gathered in the forum area to hear talks by Socialists and Anarchists. Although I barely understood the politics and philosophies debated – I was studying Science – I devoured books in my hunger for knowledge. As a shy young girl, it was easier to be part of a crowd than talk to people. I was swept up in the throng; felt the pulse of passion about ideas.

In early April we heard the horror of Martin Luther King’s assassination and the escalating race riots that ensued. The thought that maybe revolution was the way forward fed student and worker uprisings across world. In May, Sartre said of the student protests in Paris that now ‘Imagination was in power’ anything was possible. The unrest led to a general workers’ strike in France. The Prague Spring brought hopes of freedom to Czechoslovakians, despite rumblings of displeasure from communist Russia.

In America, anti-war protests escalated as the world saw causalities and atrocities mounting in Vietnam. But in June, Bobby Kennedy, the hope for change in American politics, was shot. In July, we marched from the university to the city in a protest remarkably free of incidents. Protesting felt exhilarating. Being part of something bigger was as seductive as sexual longing; that week I also lost my virginity, in an unsatisfactory evening fumble.

In the midst of this year of tumult, Joh Bjelke-Peterson was selected premier by his party on a tough ‘law and order’ platform. Despite accusations of financial conflicts of interest, he retained his portfolio as Police Minister. That same month, August, we heard Russian troops had entered Prague, crushing newly-won freedoms. Brian Laver, one of the loudest voices, was in Europe at the time for a Student Conference and sent first-hand accounts. The future for activism looked ominous.

Maybe hope was not with politics, but literature: Solzhenitsyn’s revelations about Russia or Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha about Buddhism. Then again, maybe hope lay in liberation of the body, through sex and music. News from San Francisco’s ‘summer of love’ had filtered through. Flower power and hippiedom sounded appealing.

I signed up for Foco, the new happening place at Trades Hall – described in parliament as an ‘evil and repugnant’ night spot, harbouring ‘prostitution, drugs and treason’. Under the red neon sign, we climbed a narrow stairwell to a maze of rooms on the third floor. The sign above the entrance said: ‘The price of entry is your mind’.

The ‘Dire Tribe’ performed snippets of radical theatre in the corridors. Poetry readings, underground films, feisty debates, pamphlets from revolutionary movements around the world were laid out as a feast – and under flashing strobe lights, raunchy blues from ‘The Coloured Balls’.

I couldn’t talk, so I tried to touch. I was good at it. When lights are low and flesh touches flesh, it’s easy to sink in. Radicals can be rough and rude lovers, all action and quick exits, but at least I was interacting.

∞

Queensland rapidly gained a reputation for hard-line conservatism and police intervention, just as the rest of the world seemed to be breaking free. Books, plays and events were increasingly censored or banned. After a year, Foco was closed.We read about Woodstock – four days of peace, love and music, with 400,000 young people. We listened to Cream, the Doors, Hendrix. As the musical’ Hair’ was banned in Queensland, I took the train to Sydney to see it. It’s hard to describe how the play, which seems corny today, affected us. It heralded the dawning of the ‘Age of Aquarius’. A new world opened.

Through 1969, protests escalated around the world. After news of the My Lai massacre broke, the anti-war movement gained strength among broad sections of the community, from radicals and people of conscription age to families and church groups. The civil rights and black power movement in America was growing. Indigenous rights in Australia were finally being highlighted in the protests; it was only in the 1967 referendum they were counted as citizens in the census.

By the end of 1969, a Moratorium on the Vietnam war was declared, first in America, then around the world. Early in May 1970, students were shot and killed at a university protest in Kent State, Ohio. In Australia, over 200,000 people marched. We left the university with 3500 protestors which had swollen to 5000 by the time we reached the city. But Joh’s grip was tightening.

In 1971 Joh declared a State of Emergency when the Springbok rugby team toured from South Africa. International opposition to apartheid was intensifying. In Brisbane, police charged a peaceful demonstration without provocation, backing them onto a wall and bashing those who could not escape. Much later we heard Joh had told the police union they would not be penalised for supressing demonstrators. The outrage was palpable. Reports from friends of police bullying and intimidation grew. We began calling them pigs, with reference to Orwell. Queensland become known as a repressive ‘police state’.

My own brother was called up to fight when his birthday came up in the conscription lottery – too young to vote but old enough to die. He fled to the Tasmania wilderness. As we headed towards1972 and the end of my time at uni, we felt change was finally coming to Australia with Whitlam’s ‘It’s Time’ campaign.

In December, as a 21 year old, I could vote for the first time, helping to bring about Whitlam’s landslide win after 23 years – my entire life – under conservative rule. Apart from ending conscription and our involvement in the war, one of his first actions was to remove the ‘luxury’ tax from the Pill and re-open the equal pay case for women.

But in Queensland, Joh’s government had been re-elected, despite his party gaining only 20% of vote. He had strengthened the biased ’gerrymander,’ where remote rural seats held as few as 7000 voters compared with city ones of more than 20,000. We felt helpless.

∞

Politicians weren’t the only problem. Mine was the first generation of women to ‘have it all’. To have a potential career as well as a family became the norm rather than the exception. But we had no guides. I didn’t know any older women who’d been to university, who’d even worked, let alone juggled work and relationships.

The world beckoned. Opportunities were opened like lucky dips. I was blessed to have been born white and middle class in the safe haven of 1950s Australia, to reach adulthood with the world on the cusp of change. To walk through that threshold of hope – a frontier of freedom. The Age of Aquarius swept us away: ‘harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding’.

Free love and abounding trust were wonderful in theory, but when trust was broken, it was often the woman who paid. In the early 1970s, there were rumblings of a feminist movement, but not amongst people I knew. Amongst the excitement and freedom, lay doubt and confusion. I was a quiet mouse of a girl whose mind reached further than her actions. My dreams felt too big.

So even though you’re smart and go to university, you leave science eventually, being only one of three girls amongst the hundred unruly boys, growling and thrusting their groins at you as you pass in the lab. Instead, you enter the handmaiden degree of physiotherapy. You slip back inside your cage of timidity. Putting aside your dreams, you marry young, taking the first offer of a decent man who comes along – a simple tradesman. You settle for safety.

But over the next few years, I felt the smallness of work, narrowing of options and loss of idealism as a stiffness in my chest. The sense of life lived in a well-trod pattern felt like a shroud descending. Milan Kundera captured the ambiguity and angst of relationships through the radical social change of that era as ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’. Was I brave enough to leap?

∞

By April 1979, my life was in turmoil. Politics in the state of Queensland was also in uproar. For many, the ‘sly, snide, stealthy’ way the demolition of the Belle Vue was undertaken at midnight on a weekend, became the flash point for years of disquiet about Joh’s increasing reliance on police intimidation to enact an unpopular agenda. As one Liberal member of Joh’s coalition stated, criticisms of the undemocratic, autocratic control of government by one man would ‘now stick – and they stick like dung on rotten walls’. Another conservative colleague called it, in hindsight, ‘the beginning of the end’.

Even in Parliament there was furore – as the 66 page Hansard report from the next sitting day attests. The destruction was compared by a Liberal politician to the wanton sacking of Rome by Goths and Vandals. Queensland was already the laughing stock of Australia; this was another example of madness in this out-of-date, parochial state. But Joh and his National party underestimated the breadth and depth of outrage this action generated.

In the years prior to the Belle Vue debacle, Joh’s power had grown. He even played a provocative part in the 1975 demise of the Whitlam government, by replacing a Queensland Labor senator with a non-Whitlam supporter. Whitrod, the ‘honest’ police commissioner, had resigned in 1976, protesting against political interference. His call for an inquiry was ignored. Joh elevated Terry Lewis to the top job, a man later jailed for corruption. In 1977, Joh instigated a total ban on street marches, though elsewhere in Australia they proceeded without problems. Protestors began ‘cat and mouse’ gatherings that would disperse as soon as police were called, only to re-appear elsewhere – all before mobile phones.

The difference with the Belle Vue was that many conservative colleagues and voters were appalled, not just by the demolition, but the way it was undertaken, with a disregard for process and safety. There were widespread eye-witness reports of horror and disbelief from the large night time crowd, held back by cordons of police. Many plain clothes members of the notorious ‘special Branch’ of police were present. Even conservative politicians gave accounts of being threatened, followed and manhandled by them.

At midnight, heavy trucks roared into the crowd, like an armoured task force, knocking people aside. Comments were made about the wanton destruction of tax payers’ property. No attempt was made to salvage the heritage fittings, leadlights and cedar joinery prior to demolition, the sale of which could have balanced the cost. Council property, traffic lights and parking meters, were destroyed. In the hasty process, power was left connected, a potentially dangerous situation. The supposedly white ant ridden walls proved difficult to destroy with bulldozers, excavators and large back-hoes clawing repeatedly at the building; at times, fractured sections of grandeur hovered in mid-air like a beautiful, broken beast.

One Labor politician quoted a constituent who rang him. The man was a German refugee who said the situation reminded him of ‘when the Gestapo tore down the Cathedrals back when Hitler was starting to run wild’. He felt ‘these actions of the Premier at present are very similar’ and urged Parliament to protect the people of Queensland. A Liberal politician spoke about the ‘tremendous fear’ experienced during the demolition. He described how powerless we all felt, while one man held the reins of power. That man was, as a later ABC reporter described, an arch conservative, hard-line Christian, who ‘used incoherence as a weapon’.

For many, it was not only the proud hotel that was crushed, but also the hope that democracy and decency would win in the end. The ‘fight the building put up to stay erect’ mirrored my own struggle over that coming year. The fall of the Belle Vue marked my own year of destruction, when I fled, in my late twenties, from my marriage, house, job and country. It was the final straw.

∞

By 1986, back in Brisbane, I was a wounded single mother of two pre-school boys, struggling to juggle work and childcare. Joh had just recorded his biggest electoral win. Nothing he touched seemed to fail. None of the rumours of corruption stuck. Despite the furore surrounding the Belle Vue, he demolished the beloved Cloudland ballroom in a similar overnight raid in 1982. He even began a campaign to be Australian Prime Minister. Protest seemed hopeless.

Then in May 1987, the Four Corners documentary, ‘The Moonlight State’ aired on ABC, revealing evidence of police corruption and political interference. We’d heard rumours of ‘bag-men,’ ‘bribes’, ‘verballing’ and ‘planted’ evidence for decades. Joh was in the USA and had left his deputy, Gunn, as acting premier. With supreme irony, lampooned by cartoonists, Joh was reported to be at Disneyland when Gunn instigated the Fitzgerald Inquiry into corruption. And as they say – the rest is history. As evidence flowed, Joh Bjelke-Peterson was forced to resign by December.

Two years later, at the end of 1989, Labor swept to power, something we feared could never happen because of the gerrymander. At an election party at my place, in my fortieth year, my new life began in a way I believed was equally unlikely. By 1991, when Joh was charged with perjury after the conviction of Terry Lewis, I was happily married and re-building my life and career.

Joh was never convicted due to a hung jury. Later the jury foreman was revealed to be a member of the ‘Young Nationals’. By then, Joh was deemed too old and ill to prosecute. This may seem ‘ancient history’ to my children’s generation, but in these times of uncertainty, when politicians increasingly use fear to rule, we must remind ourselves that we all have a responsibility to protest against totalitarian rule, that democracy can be as fragile as an old building.